rpo is back--or was it ever gone?

[banjobenne1]

Hello Cabforward, go to your search bar and type in RAILWAY MAIL SERVICE LIBRARY, hit go. They have a vidio of which I have copy called Men & Mail in Transit. It is very good, but I don't remember how much I payed for it. If they get e-mail I didn't see an address for it. Good luck. Ben

[Mookie]

Dave - can you give us a short list of what RPO did?

Jen

[dknelson]

Oh yes Amtrak hauls lots of mail
But it is bagged and sorted when it is put on the train and not touched until it is unloaded. The old time railroads did that too but that was not what an RPO was for
Dave Nelson

[cabforward]

i always enjoy stories about r.r-ing, thanks.. the newswire for 5/29 has a story 'sun kink derails 2 cars..' the story says a pass. train derailed 2 mail cars.. i dont know if they were rpo, maybe they cant be called that anymore, but mail car is definitely an operative term for hauling mail via rail..

[dknelson]

????
To my knowledge the true RPO is dead and gone. that is, while Amtrak hauls mail, and perhaps mail is on some intermodal, that is not what the RPO did. The RPO was just that --a true post office. Mail was sorted on the car, mail was franked or stamped or canceled or whatever you call it on the car, mail could even be dropped off on a slot on the car side. True US post office employees were inside doing their jobs. (By the way there were also bus-like vehicles which likewise had mail sorting while the vehicle traveled the roads),
I do not think there is anything like that today.
I once heard an old RPO man tell stories which were pretty interesting. You have to be old like me to remember when there was mail delivery twice a day. He said that in theory a person who went to the Chicago depot to mail a letter in the early morning into the RPO car's slot while the train waited at the depot, that mail would be sorted and dropped off (on the fly -- and picked up ditto) along the route and as far west as Omaha it was possible and even likely for that letter to be delivered to a home that same afternoon, because the local post office would get mail entirely pre-sorted -- they had nothing to do but put it on the delivery truck. Same day delivery on the US postal service thanks to RPO service. Not even FedEX offers that today
And we are told RPO was done away with to SPEED postal service! And by the way, those were trains pulled by steam. Old fashioned huh?
Dave Nelson

[cabforward]

what about the rpo? when did it come back, or was it ever really gone? what does it carry? what distance? what areas does it cover? who moves it, just amtrak or other systems, too?

all info appreciated..